A 25-chapter income strategy guide for career professionals ages 50–70. Written by a practicing financial professional who has guided hundreds of real retirees through the decisions that define retirement.
You spent a career making smart decisions. This book shows you how to apply that same discipline to your retirement income.
Most retirement books were written for someone else. This one was built for the person who saved deliberately, built something real, and now needs the strategy to match.
Structure your income to help support the retirement lifestyle you have in mind — with strategies built around real households, not academic scenarios.
Filing age, spousal coordination, and survivor planning — the choices that quietly shape long-term household income for the next thirty years.
Sequence withdrawals, manage bracket exposure, and design a household plan aimed at helping you keep more of what you’ve earned over a long retirement.
Understand how the order of returns — not just the average — can shape the longevity of a retirement portfolio, and how to plan around it.
Medicare, IRMAA, supplemental coverage, and long-term care planning — framed around protecting your financial independence rather than disrupting it.
Translate strategy into a clear, actionable plan — one you can hold up against the next thirty years and the people who depend on you.
Most retirements aren’t lost on a single mistake. They’re shaped — for better or worse — by a small number of choices. The book walks through each one.
Mark Buckley is a retired Miami-Dade firefighter and paramedic and a Financial Professional with Prudential Advisors. He has spent his career on both sides of the work this book describes: first protecting the lives and homes of the people he served, and now helping families translate a working lifetime of saving into a retirement that can support them.
He has guided hundreds of retirees through the decisions that define retirement and is the author of Beyond The Firehouse: National Edition. The Retired Professional is the strategy guide he wished existed when his clients first walked through his door.
A structured walk through the strategy — from foundation to legacy — organized the way a real retirement income plan is actually built.
Framing retirement, the new math of longevity, and the decisions every plan rests on before income strategy even begins.
Filing age, spousal coordination, and survivor benefits — the decisions that quietly drive household income across the next several decades.
Pensions, rollovers, and the trade-offs around control, survivor protection, and the long-term behavior of money in retirement.
The costs people don’t plan for — taxes, healthcare premiums, IRMAA, and inflation — and how a strong income plan absorbs them.
Sequence-of-return risk, Roth strategy, charitable giving, and the levers professionals actually use to manage outcomes across a long retirement.
Beneficiary planning, tax-aware legacy strategy, and the documents that turn intent into a clear outcome for the people who depend on you.
Every household is different, and the strategies in the book only matter when they’re fit to your situation. Schedule a no-obligation conversation to walk through where you are and what a clear plan could look like.
The fastest path is usually a short call. Use any of the contact methods below, or send a message through the form. I’ll get back to you personally.